


Governing Intelligence

by sunsmasher



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Blood, M/M, OT3 compliant, Pre-OT3, Pre-Slash, Tarvek Gets Fucked Over, Unresolved Sexual Tension, agatha is just 'person not appearing in this story'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-04
Updated: 2016-01-04
Packaged: 2018-05-11 16:41:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5633761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/pseuds/sunsmasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tarvek wakes up on Castle Wulfenbach. Gil's waiting for him. Or at least, someone wearing Gil's skin.</p><p>
  <i>“There’s something very wrong with Gil,” Tarvek tells his ceiling, settling back against the pillows. One of the panels near the door has come loose, hinting coyly at its hissing copper guts. “Something he doesn’t want to tell me about. And who's a half-dead former prince to ask when he’s trapped on his enemy’s ship and his enemy won’t talk?”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Governing Intelligence

" _Agatha_ ," shouts Tarvek, and then he wakes up. 

He's in a bed. He's in a dim, red room. He's on the _Castle_. He's not even an inch off the sheets before rabid, shrieking agony has him flat on his back and whimpering. 

"Wouldn't do that if I were you," says Gil. Tarvek bites his pain between his teeth and inhales. 

"Wulfenbach," he grits out, voice hoarse. He shifts his hand as he speaks, feeling across the thin sheet he’s lying under. It seems to take an age, dragging his fingers over his stomach, feeling the shallow humps of his ribs, discovering the swamp of bandage overtop his heart. 

"Martellus has a better eye than I’d have thought,” comes Gil's voice. Tarvek can't see him. He's closed his eyes again, pitifully exhausted by the mere act of moving his arm, and pale colors bloom behind his eyelids. "The knife might have killed you on its own, never mind the poison."

Ah. Poison. That would explain it. Because Tarvek's been stabbed before, enough times to have created a rather hard-won baseline for the experience, but he's never felt as useless as this. Beyond the pain, and there’s a lot of pain, the leaden weight in his bones is crippling.

“What…” he says, then, “Was it?” after a torturous pause.

“Something of his own devising. We had a hell of a time flushing it out before all your skin sloughed off, and it does seem to have done you some damage despite our efforts. But nothing you won’t bounce back from, I’m sure.”

Gil’s tone is light and his voice is haggard beyond all imagining. He’s not even trying to hide it. Tarvek opens his eyes and, muscles creaking furiously, turns his head.

Gil sits in a chair beside his bed, coat slung over the back, legs crossed and boots propped up on Tarvek’s sheets. He sits like a king and he looks like shit. The dark circles under his eyes could have been etched in. When he smiles, catching Tarvek’s bleary eye, his grin is feral. The lines it carves in his face are mesmerizing.

Whatever’s happened to him, it didn’t happen quickly. “How long?” Tarvek asks, and Gil leans forward with a laugh. Without glasses, he blurs in Tarvek’s sight.

“Two and a half years,” says the shape of Gil. “You lazy prick.”

 

* * *

 

The next time Gil’s sitting beside his bed, Tarvek can prop himself upright. That it feels like such an accomplishment is deeply horrifying.

“Agatha,” he says as Gil settles in. “You avoided the question last time.”

Gil barks a laugh, kicking his boots up on the end of the bed again, just shy of Tarvek’s feet. Tarvek refrains generously from sneering, if only because he thinks the facial manipulation might make his headache worse. “I didn’t avoid the question, you passed out. She’s in Paris right now, no doubt trying to find a way to free Mechanisburg.”

Gil had explained about Mechanisburg before Tarvek… well, he probably had passed out, it’s not exactly beyond the realm of belief. His instinct to hotly deny any and all blame is pure contrariness, and should be dismissed as such. Surely.

“Is she safe?” Tarvek asks, and is faintly proud of himself for his restraint.

“She’s never safe,” Gil replies, and the smile falls from his face. The sparkiness in his voice, present since Tarvek’s been conscious enough to hear it, flares sharply. “Zeetha and Wooster and Violetta are with her, though, which is something. And the talking cat creation—“

“Krosp.”

“Krosp, right, they’re all in Paris together. And I don’t include them among the ‘making Agatha safer’ contingent, but Martellus and Xerxephina are hanging around, as well.”

“Damn, of course they are,” Tarvek groans, dragging a knuckle between his eyes. Gil grins, taking his usual amusement from Tarvek’s suffering. “Tweedle must have officially been made heir in my absence. Well, presumed absence. I assume you haven’t let it get around that I’m alive?”

Gil shrugs easily. His shoulders tug at the seams of his shirt. “I doubt it can stay quiet for long, the manpower it took to dig you out and patch you up, but for now, yes. You’ve become one of the Baron’s imperial secrets, Sturmvoraus. Feeling special?”

Tarvek can’t look away from how Gil’s smile scores his face. He’s bleeding tension, even here in a small room with only an invalid for company, and the stillness around his eyes hardly matches the sharp stretch of his features. _There’s something wrong with Gil,_ says Agatha in his memory, her hair still dripping with rain.

“Always,” Tarvek says, smiling smoothly, and Gil seems almost human when he laughs.

"Snake," he grins, an accusation Tarvek suspects is born more of habit than real spite (which is disconcerting in its own fashion.) "You're feeling better then? Finished with the puking? There was substantial puking last time, don't know if you remember that."

Tarvek wrinkles his nose. "Yes, thank you, I do—"

"Because you got it all over my favorite pair of boots—" Gil is enjoying this. 

"Yes, Wulfenbach, shut _up_. I'm _fine_." He's not fine, his head is pounding, his chest is throbbing, and his skin feels only tenuously attached to his bones, which is thrilling, but he'll be damned if he's going to be telling Gil that.

"Of course you're not fine," says Gil, who doesn't need telling. The low, red glow of Tarvek's room gleams off the fittings of his vest. "But at least you're managing full sentences."

"Don't you have a failing sham of an empire to run?" snaps Tarvek. Gil, staying true to character, looks smug. 

"And a despotic castle to keep afloat and a continent to bring under my iron-fisted rule. Which you'll be helping me with, of course." He rolls his sleeves back down over his wrists as he stands. Tarvek finds himself tracking the movement and blinks furiously. "I'll send the nurse back in, she can give you something for that headache. You've really got to stop refusing painkillers, you know, you're only spiting yourself."

"I'll be the judge of that."

"And you call me a martyr," Gil mutters, rolling his eyes. The room is small, hemmed in by the castle's iron bones, and Tarvek has to crane his neck to see Gil's face when he isn't sitting. "I assume you want books?"

This is so stupid a question, Tarvek refuses to even dignify it with a response. That he hasn't already been provided some is a hangable offense, and he attempts to convey the depths of this crime in his terrible, intimidating frown.

Gil smiles despite this. He keeps doing that. "One of my hunters dug up Uskglass' _On the Thaumaturgy of Ravens_ in Calais, I'll see that you get a translation. Plus whatever else is lying around and isn't state secrets. How about some aeronautics?"

"Not if it's going to give you ideas, no." The high-speed (terminal velocity) drop from the Castle in Gil's ‘ _flying_ ’ machine with only Othar Tryggvassen and a traitor Jaeger for company is still traumatizingly fresh in Tarvek's mind.

"Coward." 

"Imbecile."

Gil steps around the bed, hand reaching for the door. His mouth is framing his goodbye. Tarvek’s chest screams as his body tenses. "There is another question you didn't answer last time," he says. 

"Oh?” Gil stops. “Was this before or after the puking?" 

Tarvek doesn't rise to the bait. One of Gil's hands clenches and relaxes unevenly by his side, an action he doesn't seem fully aware of. His face is still smiling.

Tarvek’s isn’t. “What are you going to do to Agatha when you find her?”

Gil almost looks surprised, though there’s that hollowness to his features again, like the wide eyes and the raised brows are a mask poorly fitted to his face.

“I’m going to keep her safe,” he says. “Like we promised.”

Like Tarvek is the one who’s forgotten. “Mmm,” hums Tarvek, feeling his brows start to draw together and trying to stop it. Trying to keep his tone even and cool. “And what did your father do to you when he caught you in your lab, Gil?”

The engines are ever-present on the Castle, a perpetual bone-tickling hum that Tarvek found himself sorely missing in the first months after his exile. As Gil stares at him, his own face settling into something less than pleasure, the engines are the only sound in the room.

“Threatened to beat me within an inch of my life and then tossed me in the cells for a few hours,” Gil says at length, hand still on the doorknob. “He made some proclamations about disinheriting me, but Mechanisburg was lost before anything could come of it.”

 _Of course_ , thinks Tarvek, clenching his hands in his sheets. “Of course,” he says aloud, and spreads his palms flat again, smoothing out the wrinkles. “Never a very forgiving man, your father.”

“Rarely,” Gil agrees, narrowing his eyes. Tarvek is forcibly reminded of his loathing for frontal assaults like this. They never earn him more than suspicion or scar tissue. “I’ve got to go. Take your painkillers.”

“Of course, Herr Baron,” says Tarvek, and Gil’s glare sharpens, but he closes the door behind himself without reply. Tarvek is left alone with the dim red lamps and the echoes of the engines.

Agatha in his memory, rain in her hair, rain curving down her cheek, confused and furious and hurt. _There’s something wrong with Gil_.

“There’s something very wrong with Gil,” Tarvek tells his ceiling, settling back against the pillows. One of the panels near the door has come loose, hinting coyly at its hissing copper guts. “Something he doesn’t want to tell me about. And who's a half-dead former prince to ask when he’s trapped on his enemy’s ship and his enemy won’t talk?”

He closes his eyes, setting his glasses on the table beside his bed. The headache is getting worse. It feels like someone’s trying to tunnel their way to freedom through his skull.

“I was never supposed to get used to having help,” he mutters as the pain begins to swell.

 

* * *

 

Sliding out of the madness place is never pleasant. The body has a way of remembering the debts a sparky mind racks up, and it always presents its tally with gouging interest. Being shocked out of the madness place, though, is far worse. That’s like a very energetic sledgehammer to the cortex.

Tarvek, hardly at his best anyways, feels the hit precisely. He’d been teetering on the dim edge of normalcy for an hour at least before a Van Rijn Muse wearing a Wulfenbach sigil poked her head around the door to Gil’s lab, and that’s enough for him. The world narrows in a heartbeat. The fatigue hounding him since he woke up on the Castle makes its triumphant, gloating return.

“Ah, Bohrlaikha,” says Gil as Tarvek thuds back into his wheelchair. And he’d been doing so well at standing, too. “Excellent. I need Captain Naismith’s recon from Alsace, and a copy of whatever the Deep Thinkers have got for me on the Queen of the Dawn’s trading caravans.”

The clank blinks dispassionately. She’s too big to get through the door entirely, but from what Tarvek can see of her inner workings, their delicacy matches that of her pale faceplate. This wigs him out severely.

“You have a direct wire to your spymaster, my lord,” says the clank. Even her voice is a fine intricacy, not dissimilar to what Tarvek can remember of Tinka’s.

“Right,” Gil replies, then looks down the table to Tarvek. “Haven’t got that anymore.”

Ah. Yes. Tarvek glances over at his own workspace. It’s incriminatingly full of copper wire.

The clank woman ( _the Muse?)_ sighs. The motion around her mouth is exquisite. “I’ll send a runner. Please remember that I am your guard, my lord, not your bat-man.”

“Couldn’t forget if I tried,” Gil replies with an insincere grin, voice sparking furiously, as the clank ducks back out.

“That’s a _van Rijn_. A van Rijn _wearing your sigil,_ ” Tarvek says as soon as they’re alone. Gil has already returned to his work, and the grand windows of his study/lab/seat of power show only night, and gathering clouds. How long have he and Tarvek been here? How long has there been a _Muse_ on the ship?

“She looks quite like one, that’s for certain,” Gil says, picking at the desiccated brain of a slaver wasp. “However, she herself claims that my father built her.”

“Your _father—“_

“I know, finesse was never his strong suit.” Gil shrugs. “But she’s a mystery I haven’t exactly had time for. My father had a hand in her, if he didn’t create her himself, and she’s certainly no Muse of yours. I don’t honestly care where she came from, so long as she—and her implication of my father— keep what’s left of the court happy.”

“An illusion of continuity?”

“A reminder. My father still lives while his plans are in motion.”

 _Truly_ , Tarvek thinks but doesn’t say. Bohrlaikha is only the most obvious of the old Baron’s contingencies.

Tarvek sighs raggedly. The chill of the cluttered, cavernous room is acute, absent the buffer of the madness place, and whatever tolerance to cold he built up as a child in the mountains, the poison and the stabbing have about rid him of it. Physical weakness is such a damn nuisance. He should have made Gil get him a bigger coat.

What had he and Anevka done, when the cold got too much and before the family harvested her for parts? Hidden, mostly. Sometimes in their mother’s closet, among all her furs, before she too was sacrificed to the Sturmvoraus name. Afterwards, the library and all its forgotten corners had been popular. Or at least Tarvek had insisted on the library and his little sister had followed along gamely because she’d loved all his—

Tarvek remembers. Anevka had loved the stories. Why hadn’t he thought of it sooner? _No Muse of mine, indeed!_

Softly muttered cursing makes him look up. Gil leans over his desk, expression mutinous, and, as Tarvek watches, flicks the wasp brain across the room. It transcribes a neat arc towards the spot just left of the biohazard bin.

“Rotted again?” Tarvek asks, stuffing his hands into his armpits.

Perpetual sparkiness does little for Gil’s temper. He takes the time to gnash his teeth before answering, muscles jumping in his jaw, and still keeps hold of his calm by only a bare, disreputable inch.

“The fifth in a row,” he growls. “They don’t survive outside the body, they don’t survive in a severed head, they don’t survive in damn _cryofreeze_ …”

Tarvek shrugs and immediately regrets the movement. The stretch on his stitches is fairly agonizing. “So bring a live one onto the ship.”

“Right! Because containing live slavers has never failed catastrophically and killed hundreds.”

Tarvek waves an airy hand this time instead of shrugging. “My family managed.”

“Your family of maniacs and Judases whose actions you have no ethical qualms with whatsoever? That family?” The verbal sparring, nearly rote for them at this point, has its intended effect. Gil thumps back in his own chair with an ashen smirk.

“The very same,” Tarvek replies, voice prim. “It _is_ for their knowledge of such wonders as how to contain live slavers without killing all the townspeople that you brought me aboard, right?”

“Well, it certainly wasn’t for the pleasure of your company,” Gil mutters, though he doesn’t sound especially put out. The shadows under his eyes are darker than ever in the stark light, the small, mindless motions he makes with his hands half-hidden by the clutter on the long tabletop.

“Wulfenbach,” Tarvek asks, as the silence stretches, “When did you last sleep?”

For a moment, Gil looks utterly shocked. “You care?” he laughs, more from the surprise, Tarvek suspects, than any real humor.

“By my clock, we were working for nearly 18 hours,” Tarvek says in reply, though it’s not really a reply to Gil’s question at all. “And before you woke me up, you were busy quashing those Gunner’s Court dogs— _don’t_ ask me how I know about that, you’ll only embarrass yourself— and before that you were overseeing the retrofit of the Heliolux fleets. Probably even tightening the screws yourself, if your minders would let you. When did you last _sleep_ , Wulfenbach. A week ago?”

Gil shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

“A _month_?”

“I have got an empire to run here!”

“Well you’ve already failed that pretty soundly—“

“ _Sturmvoraus_ ,” Gil growls, ‘ _back off now_ ’ signaling in all quarters.

“—And I can’t imagine the prolonged sleep deprivation _helped_ any!” Tarvek continues regardless. “Take a god damned nap, Gil, you look like shit.”

Slightly cruder than he intended, but it makes Gil snort. “This from you?” he smirks, casting an accusatory eye over Tarvek. How he’s able to forget slights so quickly has always been beyond Tarvek's imagination.

“Yes, and I’ve just been stabbed in the heart and poisoned, so I know what I’m talking about. Do you have anything to do anyways before your messenger gets back?”

Gil’s reply is instant. “Of course I do. There’s the reports from—“

“Anything you can’t put off for the next twenty minutes?” Should be all the time Tarvek needs, anyways.

“Plenty!”

Tarvek snorts. “You’re lying to yourself. _Sleep_. If anything comes up, I’ll take care of it.”

“ _You_ —!”

“Have I done it before?” Tarvek snaps.

Gil opens his mouth, the dark scrapes of his eyebrows already colliding, and then he closes it. And then he looks mulish. His mouth opens again. “For twenty—“

“‘ _For twenty minutes, maybe_ ,’” Tarvek finishes for him. Gil’s face twists unflatteringly. “My point exactly. And there aren’t even any Torchmen this time. Take a nap, you idiot. Very few people will die.”

Gil leans back in his chair, a look in his eye Tarvek finds worryingly hard to decipher. Out of direct light, face half-shadowed by his hair, Tarvek could almost believe he’s human.

“You don’t owe me anything for bringing you back, you know,” he says at length.

Tarvek stiffens. “Of course I don’t.”

"Well, to be clear, you actually owe me your life several times over and if you don't help me destroy the Other I'll punt you off the ship, but—" he pauses, and there's something still in his gaze that Tarvek doesn't know or like, "—you don't owe me _this_." 

The gesture he makes is almost elegant. One hand outstretched between them, blunt fingers spread wide, the light from the workbench picking out each spot of dried biology on his palm. 

"What exactly is it that you think I'm offering?" Tarvek asks. The wariness in his voice is hardly conscious, more a long-nurtured instinct when faced with open hands.

"Friendship, I suppose," Gil says, and Tarvek sighs. He rubs a hand over the stitched-up hole in his chest.

"No," he says, and knows he's struck the right tone when the fellow-feeling begins to slide from Gil's face. "No, I think we're about ten years past that, don't you?"

"Twelve and a half, now," Gil says as he stands, and his voice doesn't lack emotion, only has no need for it. His disappointment is something they will easily assure themselves never occurred. "Wake me if anyone comes, even if you think it's trivial. Especially if you think it's trivial."

Tarvek nods silently as Gil turns away, tugging his coat from the back of a chair as he moves past. His blood hums with the rush of a lie well executed, but it lacks all of its usual pleasure.

He's not sure what in that exchange was the lie.

Gil's asleep within seconds of throwing himself down on the couch by the door, legs bent over one armrest and an arm over his eyes, snoring like a earthmover. The bundle of his massive, Baronial coat stands in for a pillow. Tarvek heaves himself onto his feet with a pained grunt a minute later, stumbling towards the door, and avoids the strange sight of Gil's face in rest. Absent whatever phantoms haunt his conscious mind, he looks little more than hungry and strung-out. Like he used to look some nights in Paris.

The side of one hand brushes against Gil’s coat as he goes past, the sleeve thrown haphazardly over one armrest. He snaps it back to his chest like he’s been burned. 

"Bohrlaikha," he says to the clank waiting outside the lab door. The exertion of walking twenty yards leaves him breathless, and he leans heavily against the doorframe as the clank woman offers a small nod. 

"Good evening, Mister Sturmvoraus," she says, voice echoing musically through her mechanism, and then raises a sculpted eyebrow. Gil's snoring is audible through the open door. "The Baron is asleep?"

"Bohrlaikha," Tarvek says, exhaling sharply as he fights for an even tone. The passphrase has to be spoken precisely. The stories taught him and Anevka that much, should the stories prove true. " _Die meeste ende di naetuereelste beweechgelickheijt_. Kneel."

Her mechanism recognizes the code before her governing intelligence. Face frozen in shock, something shrieking stubbornly within her casing, she takes a knee in front of Tarvek. Her bowed head is nearly level with his. "Sire," she says. She doesn't sound happy about it.

"Hmph," he replies. The hallway sways lazily in his vision. He's really going to need to sit down again soon. "No Muse of mine, he says. Which are you, Bohrlaikha? The name is certainly a recent affectation. Muse of History, maybe? Muse of War?"

"Family, sire," she replies. The shrieking noise within her torso is accompanied by a high, constant whine. Steam vents from the top of her spine. 

"Family? I've never heard of—" One of Bohrlaikha's arms draws back then freezes, the joint fighting its own motion with a bone-gnashing crunch. Her faceplate remains impassive, but it's clear Van Rijn's unbeatable override isn't going to stay unbeaten for long. Tarvek grimaces. 

"Alright, then, we'll make it quick. What's wrong with Gil?"

"The Baron does not sleep, sire" she replies. Her stopped arm shudders violently. 

"Yes, I know that, I— Who controls his mind?"

"The Baron, sire," she says, the shaking strain now spreading to her knees, and Tarvek swears. 

"But _which_ Baron— oh, _damn_."

Bohrlaikha unbends slowly, gears screaming, chassis groaning, hand tightening on her pike. 

" _Die meeste ende di naetuereelste beweechgelickheijt!_ " He shouts. " _Forget!_ "

The hellish noise stops. Bohrlaika completes her movement gracefully, all internal disagreements forgotten. She looks down at Tarvek, heaving for breath against the doorframe, with a blank and beautiful face. 

"Mister Sturmvoraus," she says. "The Baron is asleep?"

 _A mystery I haven’t exactly had time for_ , says Gil's voice in his head. Smug bastard. 

"For now. Good evening, Bohrlaikha," Tarvek sighs, and goes limping back into the lab. 

 

* * *

 

He doesn't have time to search for the airman. That's what he tells himself as he hobbles through the Castle's empty, orderly halls. Gil won't tell him, the clank won't talk, the airman doesn't want to be found, and Tarvek doesn't have time to look. There's only one other person on the ship who might know. He doesn't have a choice. 

That's what he tells himself, as he goes looking for Dupree. 

She's predictable, is the thing. Even with the cane, Tarvek can only stay upright and walking for about twenty minutes before he needs to put his head between his legs and maybe beg for a painkiller. His range is limited, and Airman Higgs isn't in it. But Dupree's reputation precedes her. The nurses talk freely about all the circuitous routes they take to his room in order to avoid her known haunts, and the specifics aren't hard to get out of them. Tarvek perfected his "attentive listening" face around age three. Every day around half past one, she's here. 

"Here" is a long stretch of hallway, halfway between the docking bay and what used to be the children's quarters, curving sharply at both ends. Tarvek remembers it from his first stay aboard the ship. It used to be more popular. Now there's only Tarvek, leaning on his cane and breathing heavily, to hear the pipes hiss and the walls creak. 

Part of that is Dupree's fault, of course, and Dupree's known fondness for scalping anyone who gets between her and wherever she's going, but the Castle as a whole is emptier than his memories of it. The children are gone, the civilian passengers removed, and war and desertion have depleted the rest. Gil runs his empire with a skeleton crew. All he's got are the blindly loyal, the blindly desperate, and—

"Why, _hello!_ ”

And Dupree. 

Tarvek doesn't jump when the pirate captain rounds the corner, but it's a near thing. Her grin is predatory by default, and her eyes alight with bloody relish when she sees Tarvek’s cane, the way his clothing hangs off his bones. The inky mass of her hair snaps behind her like a tail.

"What are _you_ doing out of bed, little used-to-be princeling?" she sing-songs as she approaches, teeth gleaming in the hallway's dim strip lights. Tarvek attempts to straighten his back, breathing sharply through his nose. "Come looking for a bit of fun?"

Trying to hold his ground would be pointless. Tarvek's shoulders hits the wall with a painful thump as Dupree leans in. "Captain Dupree," he hisses between clenched teeth. She's a few inches shorter than him, which doesn't make him comfortable in the least. 

"Ooooh, Mr. Princeling," she laughs, high and taunting, "You're _afraid!_ Isn't that clever. You're so clever, Mr. Princeling. Do you remember down in the Catacombs, huh? When you were treading water with all the bits and bones and I found you first so we sat and discussed all the best ways to peel the skin off someone's fingers?"

“Sounds vaguely familiar,” Tarvek says, by which he means he still has the nightmares. Sweat crawls down the back of his neck. Dupree’s grin widens.

“Like a glove, I think we decided was best, didn’t we? Peeling it off like a glove. Messy, but dramatic.”

“Captain—“ Tarvek says, then tries again when his voice gives out. Dupree’s laugh echoes down the hall. “Captain, I need your help. I need to know what the Baron did to Gil.”

“Oh, so you came looking for me on _purpose!_ Not as clever as I thought, huh?” The delight in Dupree’s round face is horrifyingly sincere. “But no one who fucks around with the Baron can really be all that smart, can they?”

She’s got a knife in her hand. Tarvek didn’t see her draw it. It catches the light when she gestures.

“Whatever’s going on with Gil, it’s his problem, you understand?” she says. “Not mine, not yours. His.”

“With all due respect, Captain,” Tarvek says, then cuts off. There’s a knife point hovering somewhere around his navel.

“With all due _respect_ , shithead,” Dupree snarls as Tarvek hovers between evisceration and slowly starving for oxygen, “He doesn’t need your help.”

“But he does need someone’s!” Tarvek gasps, seizing on it, and Dupree’s bares carnivore teeth. She shoves him back against the wall, hard enough to make his head spin, and digs her fingers into his stitches. Tarvek screams, and wishes he’d been smart enough to pick a more crowded hallway. The pain is _colossal._

“Did you really get him to sleep?” she demands. Her voice echoes oddly in Tarvek’s ears. The tip of one of her fingers is digging pretty literally into Tarvek’s chest, and she has to ask him twice before he answers. She isn’t happy about it.

“Yes!” he shouts, as blood starts to stain his shirt. He can’t get enough breath into his lungs. “Yes, yes, he took a nap! On the couch, in the lab!”

Dupree snaps her head away, eyes narrowing. The pressure on his chest, like all of Castle Heterodyne balanced a half inch left of his heart, eases minutely.

“Sorry,” he gasps, babbling through the relief. If it were up to his legs he’d have collapsed by now; her clawed hand over his sternum keeps him standing. “Sorry, sorry…”

“And what are _you_ sorry for?” she asks, her voice an atavistic kind of growl.

_Don’t say it, don’t say it, she won’t like it, don’t say it._

“I’m sorry you couldn’t do the same,” he wheezes, and no, she doesn’t like that very much at all. Dupree flips her grip on the knife, pulls her blood-tipped hand clear, and rams the hilt into his ribs. They crack with gusto, and Tarvek does drop then, all the breath gone from his body as he collapses against the wall. His chest cavity is a rainbow of hurt, and his hands scrabble at his bloody, too-large shirt.

“He trusts you,” Dupree says. She’s bending down. Her face is close to Tarvek’s. The sound of her voice doesn’t match the movement of her lips. “As much as he trusts the girl. Or as much as he used to. Maybe he does need your help, but I keep his secrets. If you want to know what his father did, ask him yourself.”

“Ask Gil?” Tarvek grits out, as he vision wavers and grays, “...Or his father?”

“Clever little twerp.” Her grin is wide and white, could encircle the world. “Don’t die before someone finds you. He doesn’t like it when you two die.”

Tarvek opens his eyes, and she’s gone. He doesn’t remember closing them, but the hallway is empty of her knife and her hair and even the echoes of her steps. “...Should hang all pirates on sight,” he mutters, hissing as he presses one hand over his bleeding chest. With his other hand he feels behind himself, fingers fumbling at the seam of the wall panel, and gets a hold. The panel comes free with a cloud of dust, clattering to the floor, and Tarvek swears breathlessly as he twists to look inside. There, third bundle from the top, assuming there hasn’t been any major rewiring in the past twelve years.

Blood bubbles from the hole in his chest. The possibility that this doesn’t work isn’t a fruitful one to consider, and so he doesn’t consider it. Tarvek grabs hold of the wires, ribs screaming, and begins, methodically, to tug.

 

* * *

 

When he opens his eyes again, Gil is there.

“That was pretty stupid,” Gil says. Tarvek is still propped against the corridor wall. Gil squats in front of him, one hand on his shoulder. His wan grin, like Dupree’s, seems to occupy much of the world.

“Had… a backup plan,” Tarvek hisses. Gil’s eyes crease with unvoiced laughter.

“Using my comm lines to send a morse code S.O.S. to half the speakers on the ship?” he asks, teasing. He peels Tarvek’s hand from his chest as he speaks. “Hell of a plan. Dupree can work pretty fast when she wants to, you know. What if you’d died before we got here?”

“What if you stopped employing psychopaths?” Tarvek replies, biting back a groan as Gil’s fingers probe at the damage Dupree did.

Gil continues to be amused by Tarvek’s suffering. “Who else have I got?” he asks. “She broke two of your ribs, and you’ll need your stitches redone, of course. How did you know the trunk cables ran down this hall?” He gestures with one hand to the loose loops of wire, pulled free from their moorings in the wall, snaking by Tarvek’s pale fingers.

“Remembered,” Tarvek replies, breath short. The hallway swings slowly, pendulum-like, behind Gil’s head. For the first time he sees the dozen Castle staff loitering around them, watching Gil button his filthy shirt back up.

“From when we were kids?” Gil’s voice is lightly curious. He’s trying to keep Tarvek talking.

“ ‘Course. We broadcast to half the fleet. You forgot?”

“No, I—“ Gil sits back on his heels, momentarily stymied. He looks, for that second, more like himself than Tarvek has seen since Mechanisburg. “Huh. I guess I did. It was about Zulenna, right? We said she’d married a pig.”

“And kissed a cow,” Tarvek adds. It was a good prank. Two auxiliary ships had come within inches of clipping a mountain, and Von Pinn had stuck them on grease trap duty for eight months.

“The look on her face…” Gil laughs.

“Worth it.” There’s some blood on Tarvek’s teeth, but if anything it makes smiling easier.

“Without a doubt,” Gil says. His hands hover over Tarvek, stained a bit with his blood. The skin over his knuckles is as pale as the rest of him, sapped of all living color.

“Tarvek—“ he starts, voice quiet, fingers not quite touching the rough of hem of Tarvek’s coat, and then he pauses. A muscle under his eye shifts. He inhales.

And then Tarvek can _see_ it, he can see the moment that whatever-it-is reasserts itself, when Gil flinches like he’s been struck and stands in an instant. He’s suddenly enmeshed, impossibly distant, and then he’s someone else entirely. Whoever’s looking down on Tarvek is not the person who informed the Wulfenbach fleet that Zulenna had married a barnyard, or the one who fished Tarvek out of the bone swamp in the Catacombs, and may not even be the one who dug him out of Mechanisburg. The eyes that meet his are shadowed and strange, and then they turn away.

“Schulz,” he says to his men, “Byrnison. Get him back to his room. Tell the nurses he doesn’t get to skip the painkillers this time.”

“Gil—“ Tarvek tries, as he’s grabbed up by careful hands, blood still coating the backs of his teeth, but Gil only looks at him like he’s surprised he’s still there.

“Don’t go wandering on your own again,” he says, “Dupree will be hunting for you now,” and that’s that. A Lackya comes running down the hall, papers in hand, and Gil is gone, off running his totalitarian scam of an empire, and Tarvek is left swaying between Wulfenbach soldiers who don’t seem particularly keen on touching him. You’d think they’d be less squeamish.

“Sir,” says one of them, audibly unsure of himself, and Tarvek sighs. The hallway is nearly empty again, and the cacophony of Gil’s entourage quickly fades. _We could have kept him safe_ , says his memory of himself, Agatha’s arms around him, the wind atop the walls of Mechanisburg tugging at this hair.

The air had still been greasy with Gil’s lightning. Tarvek had been fooling himself.

The soldiers are leading him down the hall. He tightens his arms around their necks and lets them.

 

* * *

 

The dream is strange.

He and Agatha stand side by side. She takes up the scalpel, leans over the operating table, and draws a deep V from Gil’s shoulders down to his belly button. “Here,” she says, and presses the scalpel into Tarvek’s hands. Her own carefully pull back the flesh, opening Gil up to the theatre lights. His heart beats steadily, his lungs shivering as he exhales.

“You have to help him,” Agatha says, and reaches her hand into Gil’s chest. She comes back with a handful of stones, all white and gray, all rounded by the sea. She puts these in Tarvek’s hands, too.

“It isn’t supposed to be me,” Tarvek says. His voice sounds pleading to his own ears. Whining, if he’s being uncharitable. “I condemn people, I don’t save them.”

“That’s not up to you,” she says. “It’s not up to anyone.”

Her eyes are fixed on her work, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She reaches just under Gil’s stomach, and presses a handful of clean brass bolts into Tarvek’s waiting palm. When he holds one up to the light, Agatha’s name is carved into the metal. The next bolt, it’s his.

“What if I can’t?” he asks.

“You have to try,” she replies.

“And what if it hurts?” he asks.

She faces him, smiling sadly, like she loves him. Gil’s breathing fades in and out of hearing. The brass bolts spill from Tarvek’s hands.

“You have to try,” she replies, and then he wakes up.

Airman Higgs is standing over him, holding a pair of pants. “Get up,” he says. “Put these on.” The pants land on Tarvek’s stomach. “He’s about to do something stupid.”

 

* * *

 

The stumble towards Gil’s lab and office is hurried, dark, and, for Tarvek, very, very painful.

“Don’t puke on me,” is all Higgs offers as they round the third corner and Tarvek starts wheezing.

“What’s—“ Tarvek gasps, chest pounding, ribs screeching, “—happened?”

“Agatha’s left the Master of Paris’ protection. Wulfenbach’s deploying troops. Black Squad and Tracker-Keepers.”

“He can’t—“ inhale, don’t puke, exhale, _don’t puke_ , “—be _serious!”_

This is apparently too obvious a question for Higgs to waste the breath responding. Not that he seems particularly out of breath, actually, despite all but carrying Tarvek since they left the medical wing.

“So what—“ Tarvek manages, “—am I supposed to do about this?”

Higgs grunts. They duck through the artillery bays, clattering across a high catwalk. “You need to fix him. That’s why you’re here.”

Tarvek clenches his teeth, jaw creaking. “So I’ve learned. But how am I supposed to _do_ that when—“

His shoulders meet a wall again. The pain is thundering, _again_. He gasps. “Why do you people keep _doing this—“_

“Listen,” Higgs snarls, and he gets in Tarvek’s face when he says it. His lips peel back from what Tarvek considers to be an undue amount of teeth. “You’re supposed to be _smart_. His father fears her, he loves her, and his father fears him loving her. That’s all you ever needed. He doesn’t have to tell you, just make him _show you_.”

“And _why_ ,” Tarvek asks as Higgs pulls him away from the wall, leading them on into the great guts of the ship, “Can none of you people—“ _gasp_ “—ever give me a straight answer?”

“Because we haven’t got them, either, smart guy,” Higgs says, and then they’re outside the lab. Tarvek bends over his knees, breath whistling through his teeth, every muscle and organ and bit of off-colored flesh in his body screaming blue murder, and Higgs pulls him back upright again.

“It’s got to be you,” he says. “Good luck.”

And then he pushes Tarvek through the door.

The room is humming. Gil bends over his desk, a massive, resolute thing dripping with maps and figures, his back to the door and his commanders across from him. The Black Squad’s captain blurs slightly at her edges. The Chief Tracker-Keeper seems to be staining the carpet.

Tarvek inhales as much as he’s able, ribs buckling, bandages straining, and then he starts shouting.

“Are you out of your _mind?_ ”

Gil spins, what looks like a—yes, that’s a letter opener in his fist—and stares. His face is wide, wary, veering on shock, and he's never looked less like himself in all the time Tarvek's known him.

"You're up?" he asks. His voice shudders with sparkiness. "How are you even standing?"

It's a very good question, and one Tarvek will need an answer to sooner rather than later. But not just yet. 

"You can't send troops into the outskirts! The Master will firebomb a suburb before he lets the Tracker-Keepers within a mile of Paris!"

"Sturmvoraus, you need to leave _now_ —“

"And what are they going to do if they find her? If she or the others try to resist. Will they kill Zeetha to get to her? Wooster? _Violetta?_ ”

Gil's knuckles go white around the letter-opener. “Sturmvoraus—“

“How long is this going to go on, Wulfenbach? How long will you let your monomania drive all your father’s accomplishments into the—“

"That's _enough!_ " Gil roars, dashing the letter-opener to the floor. It draws a long line of sparks across the metal before smashing through a low window and into open air. Wind explodes into the room. "I didn't pull you out of Mechanisburg so you could undermine my empire!"

"And exactly what did you think would happen?" Tarvek laughs. The pain wrapped through his bones is receding as the madness place takes over, straightening his back and clearing his vision. His mouth works faster than his mind, and usually it's a warning sign but right now it’s all he’s got. The captain of the Black Squad is armed for combat. The time for careful plotting has vanished from under Tarvek’s feet, and he thinks maybe it was never there in the first place.

“I’m a threat to your empire!” he shouts, stalking forwards. The wind from the broken window whips through his hair. “I’ve always been a threat! I’m as strong a spark as you, _stronger_ since you’ve run yourself into the ground, and if you were such a genius, you’d have left me dying in the time stop!”

Gil’s face is ugly, contorted. The Black Captain has disappeared. The Tracker-Keeper is lurching towards the door. Tarvek knows he’s close to the breaking point of this, he can _taste_ it, all he has to do is keep lying. Keep bullshitting, keep pulling it out of his ass until one or the other of them breaks.

“You’ve gone _insane_ ,” he snarls, getting in Gil’s face now, tracking the twitches and flickers of motion around his unfamiliar eyes. “And I will tear this empire from your cold and bloody hands, Wulfenbach, I will turn it over to my _family_ before I see you at its reins a moment longer.”

Confusion dashes across Gil’s face, an inability to parse hidden among the fury. “You wouldn’t—“

“I would!” He shoves Gil back against the desk. “I _will!_ I am a threat to you, Wulfenbach! I am a threat to all you hold I am the Storm King and I am smarter than you, and if Agatha won’t kill you then I’ll do it myself!”

It all lines up in his head as he speaks.

_Who controls his mind? The Baron, sire. If you want to know what his father did, ask him yourself. He doesn’t have to tell you, just make him show you._

Gil’s bloody hands, hovering over his heart.

_It’s got to be you._

Nothing good in his life has ever survived before. Why should the thought of killing this one impossible thing turn his stomach?

“And you’ll let me!” he laughs. His voice is brittle, the madness place throbbing in his ears. Gil is frozen between Tarvek’s cracked smile and the desk behind him. “You’ll let me, Wulfenbach. Same as you would let her, in the very end. Because you love me, Gil, and you always have.”

The room is approaching freezing as heat barrels out the broken window. An alarm is blaring somewhere outside the lab. Gil’s face is his and not his. He’s stuck, stalled between two gears, and Tarvek can’t fix Gil until he knows what’s wrong with him. He’s got to try.

“And isn’t your father scared?” Tarvek says, and kisses him.

For one moment, for one bare second, it’s blisteringly good. Gil surges forward, hands in Tarvek’s hair, lips moving desperately over his, kissing him back. It’s everything Tarvek never thought to hope for. It’s terrifying. It’s exquisite. And then Gil pulls away.

“Yes,” he says, and he sounds exhausted beyond imagining. “He is. I’m sorry.”

And then his hands close around Tarvek’s throat. His arms tense. His body twists. Tarvek slams against the desk with no breath left in his body. Blood bubbles in his mouth.

The face leaning over his is furious and terrified and scored with rage.

How could he ever have thought the face leaning over his belonged to anyone else?

“Baron Wulfenbach,” Tarvek smiles, coughs, as two hands tighten around his throat. “It’s been too long.”

 

 *

**Author's Note:**

> Can't wait for this to get Jossed, honestly. I'm on tumblr @[lambergeier](http://lambergeier.tumblr.com), and this story was written to make Alex and Norway happy. OT3 is end-game, guys. Keep the hope alive.
> 
> For the curious, Tarvek's passphrase is a quote from the real-life Rembrandt van Rijn. It means (essentially, there seems to be quite a debate over it), "the greatest and most natural movement."


End file.
